Although the company is a leader in the “Australian style" poker machine market, Mr Schneider said there were “big huge segments where we currently don’t participate, in which we are making great strides."

One such lucrative and competitive segment is the US Entertainment games, in which Aristocrat has been left behind. Compared to the Australian games, the Entertainment games were known to be more suspenseful, whimsical and have “a lot more drama", Mr Schneider explained in an investor briefing on Thursday.

About half the US market was filled by these machines and US operator International Game Technology [IGT], which is a dominant player in the segment, had recently begun taking share in Australia too, he said.

“Even in the home of Aussie gambling games that here is a penchant for these entertainment-style games," Mr Schneider said. “In Asia we believe roughly 30 per cent of the market is in the entertainment space. We haven’t shipped a single game into the segment. This represents in the video space the single greatest opportunity for share taking that exists."

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Mr Schneider told the investors that Aristocrat could not train talent internally to create these games, but in October 2012 it secured the exclusive services of a third party studio run by game designer Daniel Marks.

Mr Marks was previously the lead designer at High 5 Games, which Mr Schneider said created the bulk of IGT’s games in the entertainment space. “We spoke to Dan and signed him up on a nice variable contract so he’d pay for his performance," he said.

The push into US-style machines is one plank of the company’s wider strategy to increase market share in the global poker machine market. The objective on the briefing was to update investors on the rationale behind recent acquisitions and high profile hires.

Aristocrat chief executive Jamie Odell said for company to deliver returns to the market the company couldn’t rely on increasing sales in segments it was currently operating in. Instead, Mr Odell has set out a plan to grow Aristocrat’s market share by moving into new segments.

One segment the company has already begun moving into in the US is the provision of machines on revenue sharing agreements. Instead of selling machines, the manufacturer operates them in what is known as the “recurring revenue" model. These agreements, while rare and only saved for the most popular games, are lucrative. Mr Schneider said recurring revenue machines make up about 8 per cent of the total slot market in the US but drive about 43 per cent of manufacturers’ revenue. Aristocrat plans to double its available titles able to be sold-in on the revenue sharing agreement annually, for the next two years. “We’re making a hard play for this space because of the value of it," Mr Schneider said.

The push into this segment is also backed up by a new recruit, Joe Kaminkow, who will join the company in May and previously worked for 10 years at Aristocrat’s rival IGT.